The Five
by merick
Summary: An Anniversary Fiction. The story of Pam, and her involvement in one of the most compelling unsolved mysteries cases in London. Rated M for Violent and gruesome descriptions.
1. Chapter 1

November 9, 1988

"You seem preoccupied my child." Eric Northman came to sit beside his offspring on the edge of the roof top decorations, letting his legs hang over the ledge right beside hers. The façade was part of the oldest remaining sandstone on the centuries old hospital, which had taken many names, but would always be the London Hospital to Pam; despite its many iterations. The well-worn brick, in its muddy brown still betrayed the smells of past times, the coal smoke and soot of when London had been a much different place, and Pam a much different person. The newer aspects of the campus spread out behind them like horrible glass cubes nailed on to the classic building, Looming over it in a macabre fashion, much like the things Pam herself was remembering. Eric noted that she was wearing her black leather again. She was taking to wearing it more and more, and she looked good in it. She had been so long hiding herself in plain sight, they all had. But now with the talk amongst the groups of finally revealing themselves, with the near perfection of the synthetic blood, Pam seemed to be trying to distance herself from the guise she had been holding up virtually since the day she had been turned.

"You know what day it is, don't you Eric?" She turned slightly towards him, but never quite let her preternatural vision leave the streets she was watching over.

"I do." He put one of his large hands over hers and squeezed it slightly.

"And this is year one hundred Eric."

"Do you think he'll be back?"

"I have to stay and find out. He nearly destroyed me; he could have destroyed all of us. And I am not one to forget or forgive such things easily." Pam could see the grin spreading on her makers face. She did not feel like smiling.

"Then I will stay with you."

OOOO

Pamela Ravenscroft hadn't known the five personally. She had been turned perhaps fifty years too soon for that, not that her particular class would have found much business in the Whitechapel district. It was bad enough that her father had disapproved of Emily's cousin as a match for her, he would have lost his mind if he had heard of his daughter consorting with the working women and the poor of the east end. But Eric was so much different than him. Eric had taught her the easiest places to hunt. One of those places being amongst the destitute. (There were others certainly, where being able to hypnotize was the greatest assert, because it brought not only the blood but also the riches.) However, when you needed complete anonymity it was best amongst the folk that no one would miss. Not that Pam killed; at least she didn't kill the women. The men, well, sometimes they tried to take great liberties and that earned them the just punishment of her fangs.

The women though, they sparked a remnant of pity in her dead heart. But for the social standing of her father she knew she could just as easily have ended up in the same predicament as the women of the street. And she had been under the control of men, dependent on them as much as these women had been. It touched something in a heart that still remembered what it was to be human, and a second-class one at that because of her sex. Eric had given her her freedom, and though she could not grant that much to these sorry women, she could at least give them a respite and the gift of another day. It had been a good feeding ground, especially when she was on her own, for Eric had his own business to attend to, until those dozen or so weeks in the fall of 1888. Then it all went to Hell.

Friday, August 31 had been the first night. It wasn't that there hadn't always been murders in Whitechapel, there were likely far more than the Metropolitan Police ever knew about. A murder could easily be disguised as illness, and bodies could be carried to nearby waterways or into the furnaces of the workhouses without so much as a sideways glance mostly, or for the expense of a copper coin. Pam had been to the district a few times before that night, and had hunted quite successfully, but there was just something about the air that night, a heavy sense of 'otherness' that made her wary, and somewhat unhappy that Eric was not at her side. She was still young then, and the presence of other supernatural beings was still a foreign feeling to her.

It was the blood that drew her to the scene, nothing so banal as screams of terror or the sight of a fleeing criminal. It was just the thick heady scent of the blood, mixed with the stale scent of unwashed clothing and flesh that attracted her attention. She was the first to find Mary Ann Nichols, not that any accounts from the time would point that out. The blood around her body had not yet begun to congeal, and indeed, was still dribbling from the two slits across her throat. She was only a few hundred yards from the London Hospital, but Pam knew she was already dead. It wasn't the first body Pam had ever seen, and but for one thing she would have continued on her way, not anxious to be discovered near such a crime scene. Mary's skirts had been pulled up and someone had slashed her abdomen in such a manner that had lain open her organs to Pam's sharp sight. Slashed, perhaps not being the most properly descriptive word; more like stabbed and ripped. For some reason that she was not yet certain of it greatly disturbed her to see the woman butchered thusly. But before she could try to set the woman to rights, or even look about for traces of the murderer, Pam heard the approaching cartwheels and melted away into the shadows of Buck's Row.

That had been the first of the five.


	2. Chapter 2  Polly

Part 2: Polly

Mary Ann Nichols, also known as Polly, was found dead outside a stable gate on Buck's Row at 3:40am on the morning of August 31. Pam might have not even given the occurrence further thought but for the gruesome manner in which the woman died, and the fact that she believed that she, Pam, had been the first one on the scene of the murder. It gnawed at her how she could have completely missed the murderer, despite her speed and stealth. In the few uninterrupted moments she had had with the newly deceased she saw only a few of the many wounds that had been inflicted on the forty three year old woman. The rest she had read about in The Times over the subsequent nights. But something about the entire scene had sparked her curiosity, and with Eric going to be away for a few more weeks, the intrigue that the papers and popular gossip were assigning to this 'Leather Apron', and to what might otherwise have been a 'run of the mill' murder (because sadly, so many in the Whitechapel district were), was compelling.

Besides the slit throat and the gashes across her abdomen, Polly also had five of her teeth knocked out, and bruises on her jaw that looked as though someone had held her face tightly in their fingers and begun to crush it, perhaps as he looked into eyes that knew they were about to die, or sadly, perhaps into a face that was so beyond forming those thoughts that nothing but the pain registered. The knife wounds had been very deep, severing the major arteries in her neck, and death, when it had come, because no one could truly say which injury came first in the rapid succession of them, had been quick and final. It was that arterial blood that had drawn Pam. The last screams of a heart pumping because it could do nothing else, and the flow seeping into the woman's hair and clothing, and her new hat.

Pam could understand the facial wounds, an easy way to disable and then kill someone. But the wounds to Polly's abdomen, they stuck with her, or rather would have stuck with her even if she didn't have the preternatural memory of her kind. Not that Pam had ever had much experience with butchers during her mortal life, or surgeons for that matter, but the method with which Polly had been laid open, or at least Pam's assumptions of such, put her in mind of those occupations; as if someone had fancied scrounging around in search of internal organs, though to what purpose Pam could not yet say. She also didn't yet know what it was that had killed Polly Nichols, but she could assure herself that it had not been a Vampire. No Vampire would have created such a mess and drawn such attention, not even a young one, as she herself still was, and none would have used a knife; it was too much of a waste.

It had been nearly impossible to stay close to the scene on the night of the murder, what with the cart men and then the constables, and finally the doctors who had been called; the street became as busy as the daylight hours. (At least Pam surmised that was as busy as the day was, it had been nearly a half century.) She had watched as long as she could, and listened to as much as she could and then she had faded away, much as the darkness did, to her own place of safety.

The following night she had dressed herself as she normally did for her outings; long skirts, a short jacket, a black and brown hat and matching gloves, with black-heeled leather shoes; enough to fade into the general population. Her skin was not nearly so pale as Eric's, she was much younger, and quite well fed then, but she still disguised her otherness with folds of fabric. Not that women generally drew attention to themselves in Whitechapel, at least not without a conscious effort that was. Hands wrapped around a small bag of nothing; another part of the disguise, Pam returned to Buck's Row, to see what might have become of the crime scene, and to see if there were things the good constables had overlooked. She felt a flutter of excitement in her chest. Eric was good company, and he had been teaching her different languages, and history, along with what it was to be an apex predator, and as exciting as those lessons were, she longed to stretch the mind she had been given with such a challenge as a brutal murder that needing solving.

It was almost sad how little trace there remained on that stretch of cobblestones, of the horror of the previous night. Someone had washed away the bloodstains, and of course the body was long gone. Only a few folk seemed to stop in their progress to recognize the significance of the place. But Pam understood it. And she could still smell the blood, and sense something else as she knelt to the stonework and brushed her gloved fingertips along the cracks between the pavers. There was something in the air, faded, but still there. Not a scent, but a feeling of a disturbance, even greater than the discomfort of believing that someone was watching you. It made Pam look up and around her as if there were something to see, but there were only fleeting shadows on the brick walls. Bending her head back she heard a breath in her ear, and wheeled around at her preternatural speed to find nothing. Fortunately her lapse earned little notice from the passers-by. In the East end, the less people see, the better for them all. And with that, she faded away, just like the corporeal shadows.

The papers told the rest of the story, though it was mostly conjecture about suspects. Pam read all the articles, remembering how it had felt to be in that place, but she discounted most of the theories; because it was obvious to her that the journalists were working on selling papers, and that the police had no ideas, or no serious desire to find any. But she had very little time to truly muse over the printed mistakes, because September 8th came up very quickly.


	3. Chapter 3 Annie

This chapter contains details of a terribly gruesome crime, real details. Please do not proceed if this will make you uncomfortable.

Merick

Part 3: Annie

People came and went at all hours of the day and night in Whitechapel. And many houses didn't even lock their doors. Not that Pam could gain access without an invitation, (and she rarely sought one, houses were crowded places with far to many witnesses; ironically, the streets were much safer, at least for her.) It didn't mean that Pam never hunted in those back streets, but for the last week she had been even more cautious than normal, the corpse she had come upon, and the breath in her ear had left her unsettled and she moved very carefully, staying aware of all the differing noises around her. The sound of two people conducting some kind of transaction behind the house at 29 Hanbury Street gave her pause, and she faded into the shadows as Eric had taught her, listening. The woman had dark brown hair, about five feet tall or so, and looked as though she had lived a difficult life, the effects of alcohol were visible on her face and in the way she stooped her shoulders forward; she looked so much older than Pam knew she likely was. The man standing in front of her, no taller than she, was disguised in a dark overcoat and a deerstalker hat. Not atypical for a man negotiating with a woman for her services, trying to keep the truth of his identity hidden. But there was something in the way he carried himself that struck Pam as wrong.

It wasn't that he didn't seem like the type of man who would venture out to find the intimate congress he desired in Whitechapel, frankly he looked the part. The coat and hat weren't new, and though he stood tall his mannerisms were not from one with breeding. His darkened skin betrayed a non-native background, though the exact one escaped her, eastern European perhaps? Pam had not yet ventured too far from the isles with Eric, not far enough to make a proper judgment as to ethnicity. But the way he held the rapt attention of the woman was almost the same as the hypnotizing that she knew as one of her powers as a Vampire. But he was most certainly alive.

He was playing with something in the left hand pocket of his coat, and finally drew out a scarf of sorts, Pam listened as he offered it to the lady, who twittered just a little as he draped it over her shoulders. But far from it being part of the payment the woman was expecting, it suddenly became a weapon as the knotted fingers tightened it with a quick tug, hands went up to pull it loose, but there was no power in them and as she slumped to the ground Pam saw a gleam, a long knife, emerge from the assailant's inner coat pocket. She could feel its silver element even from her distance, and being so young, she could only watch as first it cut the woman's throat, and next, it hacked at the abdomen of the supine body, feet put flat, legs splayed, its master working rapidly but precisely, tossing internal organs that did not appeal to him over the corpse and pocketing something else. Only her Vampire stamina kept Pam from vomiting right there.

"Stop!" she hissed into the darkness as she came to understand what the man was doing, and to understand that she was witnessing the same butcher as August 31st.

The man whirled his head, lost perhaps in the moment of his kill enough that he did not sense the being watching him. Black on black eyes seemed to shine in the gloom and he glared straight at Pam. But instead of running scared at the fanged visage that met his, he smiled in a knowing, evil grin, and waved the silver blade at Pam as if he understood completely what he was facing. He stood slowly, focused on her, not even looking back down at the body, and addressed her.

"Walk away." He said, very slowly, in a rhythmic tone that reminded her of a chant.

"What are you doing to these women?" Pam stepped from her shadowed hiding spot. He had already seen her fangs, and she felt suddenly empowered by her nature, enough that she took the chance of exposing herself.

He laughed at her, not at all frightened. And that was disturbing in and of itself. Pam felt a shudder run unbidden across her chest but it did not stop her curiosity, or turn her away.

"Nothing you need to concern yourself with bloodsucker." And he waved the silver blade at her again. It prompted another hiss, though now coated with gore it seemed to affect Pam to a lesser degree. She moved towards him.

"Bitch!" he exclaimed in a harsh whisper and ran off. She could have pursued him, but there were suddenly many more voices coming; voices he had likely heard as well. Pam faded away just as quickly as he had, sensing the sun, and the impending danger that came with it. Though she knew that the mangled corpse left on the ground, just beyond her reach to conceal, was also contributing to the sense of unease. Leaving bodies laying around the streets of London was never a good policy, because it aroused peoples' fears, and the interests of the police and vigilante gangs; never good when you needed to hunt those streets.

Annie Chapman was killed in the early morning hours of September 8th. Like Polly, she had found herself without enough money for a bed, and had gone to the streets to earn it. The coroner found no trace of alcohol in her system, so she had not been drinking away her money that night, even though she was an alcoholic. Of course, what the coroner had found was far more disturbing. Her tongue was protruding from her mouth and she had the look of someone who had been strangled. Of course the gash across her throat made a precise assessment problematic. It had been cut just as deeply as Polly's. The assailant had bent her legs at the knees, and rigor was beginning to set in when the police found her. Deerstalker Hat had slashed open her abdomen and thrown her intestines over both of her shoulders. Blood was discovered everywhere about, from all the wounds inflicted by the 6 to 8 inch knife, wounds and a weapon that were eerily similar to the ones observed on Polly only a week earlier. Once transported to the corner, body on a pushcart, it was discovered that part of Annie's uterus had been cut away, and was nowhere to be found in the gore that remained of her innards.

Now wary, the police released fewer details of this second murder; which left the press to speculate wildly about the identity of the assailant. What information Pam could get from the papers she dismissed, having seen the man at work herself, knowing he was no 'leather apron' or mentally ill cook. She knew, that though he was human, he was much more than simply that; and he knew what she was. She began to miss Eric a great deal.


End file.
